How Dark the World Becomes

  HOW DARK

  THE WORLD

  BECOMES

  FRANK

  CHADWICK

  How Dark the World Becomes

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Frank Chadwick

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-3870-7

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-988-3

  Cover art by David Seely

  First printing, February 2013

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chadwick, Frank.

  How dark the world becomes / Frank Chadwick.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3870-7 (trade pb)

  1. Life on other planets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.H2184H69 2013

  813’.54—dc23

  2012043560

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Barraki and Tweezaa.

  You know who you are.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks first of all to my many friends and colleagues who read the work and offered both insightful criticism and generous encouragement, but particularly to Jake and Beth Strangeway, Don Perrin, and Bart Palamaro, one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with. Thanks also to everyone at the Greater Lehigh Valley Writer’s Group, especially my critique group pals, for making an inescapably lonely occupation a little less so.

  Finally, thanks to the whole gang at Baen Books, but especially to Gray Rinehart, Toni Weisskopf, and Edith Maor—who gives great line-by-line.

  There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail,

  there is a tiny and brilliant light in the heart of man

  that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

  —Leo Tolstoy

  ONE

  Arrie . . . Arrie was something else: an iridescent-skinned lizard, a bit over two meters tall, wearing bell-bottoms, a tie-dyed tee shirt, and rose-tinted granny glasses. Pretty odd getup for a Human these days, let alone a Varoki, but Kako Arrakatlak—Arrie to his pals—was deep into that whole retro–Haight-Ashbury scene. I figured that was how he romanticized mainlining Laugh. Well, that was his business.

  His shining hairless head looked small on that long body, and, if you weren’t used to looking at Varoki, there were things just wrong with it: the ears as big as your hands—leaf-like, delicate, and constantly moving—the narrow, slitted eyes, broad, flat nose, and the big brow ridges that made his forehead look smaller than it was, made him look stupid—which he was not.

  He had me listening to his latest “classical music” acquisition. I could have told him Yanni being dead a little over a century don’t make his stuff classical, but when your best customer wants to impress you with how hip he is to Terrakultur, you don’t spit in his eye; you sit there and you listen to the overproduced, soulless crap as if it meant something. The color and pattern of the walls around us changed in time with the music, the smart surface keyed into the audio data stream, and Arrie had his system rigged to look like a back-projected psychedelic light show. Only thing missing was a lava lamp.

  Finally it was over, and Arrie took a slow, gurgling pull on his water pipe, ears quivering, smiling in dreamy pleasure. He held the mouthpiece in his long, bony lizard fingers—too long for the number of joints, so they looked awkward and graceful at the same time, like spider legs.

  “Beautiful, Sasha, you agree?”

  “A remarkable piece of music,” I answered honestly, feeling no need to share the precise remark I had in mind.

  “Do you know why I find your music—Human music—so fascinating? Because it is a window to your souls, and your souls are amazing!

  “We found you—what?—less than seventy standard years ago, and already Human composers, architects, designers are everywhere. Your music and visual arts have thrown the aesthetic sensibility of the Cottohazz into turmoil. But this other side of you—this delicious, savage darkness . . . Your soldiers are the most feared in the Cottohazz, second only perhaps to the Zaschaan. And Humans are taking over organized crime everywhere. You are such brilliant criminals!”

  “Well, now you’re makin’ me blush,” I said. I shifted my weight and put my left arm up on the back of the couch, and my jacket fell open a little to show the chrome-plated automatic in the shoulder holster. I hardly ever wear the damned thing, but Arrie gets a kick out if it, and what the hell—a little theater never hurts. “So if we’re so smart, how come you guys own everything?”

  He smiled and tilted his head to the side a bit, the equivalent of a shrug.

  “Give yourselves time, Sasha.”

  “Oh, tha’s good advice, Massa Arrie,” I drawled. “Meantime, we jes’ keep choppin’ cotton.”

  He smiled again, knowing enough Human history to appreciate the reference. Like I said—very into Terrakultur. He took another slow pull on the pipe and studied me, ears twitching playfully. Arrie likes to play the fool, but he has to stretch his acting chops to do it.

  “Speaking of brilliant criminals,” he said, “how is Mr. Markov these days?”

  “Still a homicidal sociopath. How’s your boss?”

  He laughed—that creepy barking honk of a lizard laugh, ears fluttering like butterfly wings.

  “Still far away, and not very interested in me—the best sort of boss.”

  “Amen to that, brother.” I didn’t know a lot about Arrie’s organization, except he liked to refer to it as his Brotherhood. I figure he picked that up from Terrakultur as well, even though no Human criminal I knew of had used that term for maybe a century.

  “Speaking of business,” I said, “you got something for me.”

  He rose, unfolding like a pocket stiletto, and glided to a small table—rattan and wood, simple but elegant. It looked like Sung Dynasty to me—reproduction, of course, but a nice one. I used to be a second-story guy, and you can’t make money at that without an appraiser’s eye.

  He opened a black lacquered box on top of the table, took out a neat stack of Cotto flexichips bundled together with plastic, and tossed it lightly across the room to me. I caught it with my left hand and put it in my jacket pocket without counting—I trusted Arrie, and besides, if it was short, I knew where he lived.

  “Tell me,” he said, his eyes more serious, “how confident are you and Mr. Markov in the continued . . . reliability of your supply.”

  “If there’s a problem, I don’t know about it. Hell, Kolya wants me to lean on you to up your volume.”

  “Interesting,” Arrie said thoughtfully, his ears open but folded slightly back—alert but cautious. “Mr. Markov tells you to encourage me to increase my purchases, but you choose not to. Why?” He walked back and settled into his formachair, waiting patiently for an answer while it readjusted to his shape.

  It was a good question. I just wasn’t sure he was going to like the answer.

  The thing Arrie and Kolya Markov have in common is both of them are dangerous enough to get me killed, but that’s about the extent of the similarity. The big difference—aside from the whole lizard thing—is I figure the worst move I can make with Kolya is to tell him the unvarnished
truth; the worst move I can make with Arrie is to bullshit him.

  “Well, I see it like this. We get pretty good cover from your people up the food chain, but sooner or later, enough high-end leather-heads are going to get themselves dead on Laugh, there’s going to be serious heat, more serious than you’re going to want to handle. On that day, as we like to say, the shit hits the fan, and I figure all the shit is likely to hit our fan. You’re gonna walk away clean, Arrie, and just find yourself another hobby, while we’re gonna be up to our ears in Co-Gozhak provosts.”

  I took a chance, calling him and the other Varoki leather-heads, and his ears had folded tightly back against his head when I did, but he’d relaxed into a smile by the end of my little speech. If you insult someone, they may not love you for it, but they’ll give you points for honesty—that’s kind of a cross-cultural truism.

  “Did you share this insight with Mr. Markov?”

  “Sure, for what it’s worth. Kolya fought on Nishtaaka, so he says he’s not afraid of the Co-Gozhak.”

  “Markov fought in the Nishtaaka campaign?” Arrie asked, his ears fanning wide again.

  “Yeah, so what? Yesterday’s news. It’s not like he was the only guy there.”

  He shook his head and drew on the pipe, his ears settling back.

  “Sasha, Sasha,” he said, taking the pipe from his mouth and waving it at me like a scolding finger. “You are too hard on your friends. Veterans of Nishtaaka speak with admiration of the two Human rogue brigades they fought there.”

  “Nobody ever said Kolya didn’t have steel teeth,” I answered, and Arrie nodded his agreement.

  “So what do you plan to do, my friend?” he asked, and the pipe went back into his mouth, eyes narrow and unreadable, ears motionless. Of course, he hadn’t said I was wrong. One of the things I like about Arrie is he doesn’t waste your time denying the obvious.

  “Don’t know yet,” I answered truthfully.

  He leaned his head back and studied me for a moment in unguarded curiosity.

  “Then why share this with me?”

  “I knew it would entertain you.”

  For a second he said nothing, and then he broke into laughter.

  That same creepy honking laughter.

  * * *

  It was a good question, though. What was I going to do? I thought about it as the teardrop-shaped auto-cab hissed out into the Riverside Traffic Trench and insinuated itself into the tail-end tatters of the evening commute.

  “Clear top,” I commanded. The roof went transparent and I leaned back, taking in the view up the canyon walls, stars twinkling in the narrow ribbon of black sky way up at the top, kilometers overhead, like a diamond necklace hopelessly beyond reach. Glowing traffic ramps snaked up the sides of the canyon, linking apartment blocks and crowded market clusters, hanging from the canyon walls like glass and concrete moss. The leather-heads had a name for the city, something that translated as Capital of Peezgtaan—about as creative a name as they ever thought of. Humans came up with our own name, and now that’s what everyone called it, even the leather-heads: Crack City.

  Climb all the way up to the top of the Crack, climb all the way up and walk on the surface of Peezgtaan, and you die in maybe a minute, your lungs failing in near-vacuum, the yellow-orange light of Prime burning your skin off. But way down here, down at the bottom of the Crack, people can live. All kinds of people: leather-heads like Arrie, Humans like me.

  At least until the shit hits the fan.

  TWO

  The autocab dropped me at the edge of the Human Quarter. You couldn’t see the stars from down there; open space out in the canyon went at too much of a premium. The Quarter lurked under rock, back in the honeycomb of dark tunnels and crumbling chambers that made up most of the low-rent space in Crack City. A lot of those old chambers were left from the ice mining that made the Peezgtaan Eco-form possible, way back before we’d even heard of the Cottohazz—the Stellar Commonwealth.

  My office was on the second floor of a commercial block facing Planck Plaza. I got there half an hour before my people showed up. Somebody had stuck a flyer to the front door of the building—an announcement for a meeting of the Society of Human Progress down at St. Mike’s tomorrow evening, along with a list of speakers and the Society’s e-nexus code. I crumpled it up and threw it into a trash tub. It’s not that I’m against progress; I just don’t have a lot of patience for talk. You want to make the world a better place? Fine. Just do it, okay? Tell me about it when you’re done.

  I unlocked the office, fired up the samovar, and took a look around. The furniture’s all composite of one sort or another. The outer office had my admin’s desk—with a built-in viewer screen—half a dozen chairs for waiting clients, and a little kitchenette with the samovar for tea and a nuker to heat soup and sandwiches. I had a couple framed prints on the wall—Earth landscapes, very soothing.

  My inner office was pretty much the same, but with a bathroom and shower instead of the kitchenette, and a sofa in place of half the chairs. The furniture was sturdy and in good condition, but I’d gotten it here and there over the years, so it was all different styles and colors. The office was clean, but it wasn’t expensive looking, and that was deliberate. I guess you’d call it austere, if you were being polite, and—without making too much of this—I’m a guy you probably want to be polite to.

  Through the window, I watched Planck Plaza below. It was never very bright, even during the brief daylight out in the canyon. They had rigged up a lot of polished metal mirrors and cut some shafts through the rock to let natural light into the Quarter during the day, but there were five major levels up above us that each took some of the light, so there wasn’t much left for us. There was artificial lighting, too; power was cheap—it was the fixtures and cables and stuff that ran to money, and were always burning out, and never got fixed in less than a couple months. But even with just the feeble glow from the light tunnels, Planck Plaza was kind of nice around midday. Half a dozen food vendors usually showed up, and lots of working folks met here, to eat lunch or just stroll around and talk. Nice.

  At night it was dark, though—dark and dirty and empty.

  Henry showed up first, along with his two top people. They crossed the plaza and entered the front of the building. After a couple minutes, they showed up in the office.

  “Boss,” Henry said in greeting, and he and his two lieutenants nodded.

  “Tea’s fresh,” I said, and waved to the outer office.

  “I’ll get it,” Phil Gillman—inevitably known as Phil the Gil—the youngest of the three, volunteered. Henry settled his short, thick body into a chair across the desk. Henry was built like a linebacker, but I’d seen him move when he had to, and he was fast—really fast. Big Meg Stanker, his other lieutenant, crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. Meg was taller than any of us, and looked like she lifted weights as a hobby—which she used to. Phil the Gil was tall as well, but skinny, frail-looking next to the other two.

  “How’d things go with Arrie?” Henry asked.

  “Pretty good.”

  “He gonna up his order?”

  I shook my head. Henry frowned a little at that, and then settled back in his chair when Phil gave him a glass of tea.

  Henry was smart, and he was loyal, and he was level-headed. He wasn’t any crazier about peddling Laugh than I was, but what Kolya wanted, Kolya usually got, or there was trouble. Henry knew it, and so did I.

  “You make any progress on that special deal we were talking about?” I asked.

  “Yeah, actually.”

  “Really?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “Looks like it might work out. I think I got a guy. I’ll know more in a couple days.” He smiled.

  Now, that was good news. Henry and I were working on an e-snap data-mining project, without Kolya knowing about it. Two of the big Varoki merchant houses—AZ Simki-Traak and AZ Kagataan—had hub offices on Peezgtaan, and with round trip transmission times of weeks between dif
ferent worlds, they kept most of the proprietary stuff their techies had to reference in the float memory of their central e-synaptic core. Henry had figured out a way—in theory—we could tap into it and sell it to their competition. Lining up the inside guy was actually the hard part.

  Of course, if either the Varoki conglomerate we were planning to mine or Kolya found out what we were up to, we’d be dead a lot quicker than with the Laugh business. But potentially it was a whole lot of money . . . and clean money.

  Well, cleaner than Laugh.

  “How big a fortune we gotta pay this guy?” I asked.

  His smile got broader and he shook his head.

  “Less than we figured—a lot less. The guy’s in the wrong social club or something—I didn’t follow all of that—but he got passed over for promotion one too many times. He’s in this as much for the pain as the payoff.”

  That I wasn’t so crazy about; people out for revenge get stupid. Greed—in moderation—is a more reliable motivation. Still, it wasn’t like we had a lot of candidates to pick from.

  We made small talk for a while, waiting for Ricky Lee, my number-three guy, to show up. Big Meg showed us new pictures of her youngest daughter. Cute kid, maybe turn into a real beauty some day.

  “Good thing she takes after her old man,” Phil joked, and for a second Big Meg looked like she wanted to hit him, but then she grinned, which was good. I wouldn’t want Big Meg to hit me.

  “They’re coming,” Henry said, looking over my shoulder. He stood up and leaned over the desk to watch. I turned the swivel chair and saw Ricky and three other guys walking across the plaza. They were horsing around and laughing. There, I thought to myself, is a guy who thinks he has the world by its ass.

  “You’re gonna have to do something about him,” Henry said softly, just for me to hear.